UAB brand campaign gives faculty, staff tools needed for success

You’ve probably seen the commercial by now and heard or read comments from President Ray Watts about UAB’s new unified branding campaign and its powerful tagline — “Knowledge that will change your world.”

So you’re probably wondering, “What does all of this mean for me?”

Tools, for starters. Lots of new, easy-to-use and informative tools.

Three new websites have been launched to give you the resources needed to capture the essence of UAB and speak to each facet of our mission:

Educate diverse students.

Pursue research.

Deliver the best patient care.

Serve our local and global communities.

Expand economic development to improve the quality of life in our city and state.

The dean of our school wants us to create new student recruitment mailings and flyers to give out when we’re visiting prospective students and their families. How should I go about doing this in a way that fits with UAB’s new campaign, and are there any materials available to help me?

Think of the Brand Toolkit as the central hub for all things related to the new campaign.

Here you can find the standards and guidelines, downloads and forms, marketing resources and communications support your school, division or department needs to help tell our story.

The standards and guidelines can give your group all of the basics behind the campaign and instructions on how to create brochures and other collateral. This helps provide a consistent visual image to all UAB brochures, publications and promotional material. Key communication elements — like specific versions of the Equal Opportunity and Sexual Harassment statements that must be included in all publications produced for UAB employees and students — also are included.

Official university color palates also are located in the Brand Toolkit, including acceptable shades of green and gold and other accents.

You know, we’ve been thinking about updating our website for some time. The visuals are kind of bland, and it’s really not as functional as it could be for our faculty, staff, students and prospective students. Got anything that could help us?

Absolutely, and you are smart to think about making these changes now. UAB’s Web presence is its public face — in many cases, it makes that crucial first impression — and affects our ability to recruit and retain the best students, faculty and staff. It communicates our image and identity, and it is critical to our ability to fulfill our mission.

A cohesive Web presence with a strong visual tie to the UAB brand adds strength to our messages and reassures our visitors. It also enables each of our entities to focus on delivering content that is timely, relevant and interesting.

The Web Toolkit helps lay the groundwork for this endeavor. You can find help with the Joomla content management system, which enables you to make and update Web pages easily. With Joomla, a template is set up by the UAB Web Communications, and then the owner/administrator can give permission to others who would simply need Internet access to log in and enter content on their own schedule. There are tools built into the administrative side to customize the look and feel of the page, much like you would use in creating a Word document. You have the power to create banners and buttons that give your new-look site visual appeal.

Many aspects, including its ease of use and the ability to add to its capabilities, have made Joomla a very popular application for managing Web content. And if you don’t have a website for your group or project but would like to have one created, you can make a request.

Our division has been considering the addition of a Facebook page and Twitter account as ways to reach and interact more with our audiences. We know the world of communications is changing rapidly, and we think we need to be out there with the people, showing them what we do well and how we have the capacity to help them. How should we go about setting this up? What are the rules?

UAB encourages its employees and units to use social media to reach professional and business objectives. We’re here to help you understand policies and practices that apply and guide you in using these tools to best serve your unit, audience and the interests of UAB.

The future is a global community of readers and viewers who decide what content they want to see and when, how and where they want to see it.

More than 1 billion people use Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn and other sites to create and publish content to connect, inform and amuse themselves and others.

Content can take many forms — words, photos, audio, video or a link. It can be a story that offers insight into research results or brags about public service, an invitation to an event or photos or video of it during and afterward. It can introduce a newcomer to your readers, pat a student on the back or give a retiring colleague a chance to say goodbye.

The Social Media Toolkit contains the institution’s social media policies, procedures, best practices, information on how to brand your site effectively and the 10 pillars of better posts. Use this information to your advantage, and follow the institutional Facebook page at www.facebook.com/uab.edu and Twitter feeds at @uabnews and @uabgreenmail.

We can all work and learn together as we share the knowledge that will change your world.